Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday November 12, 2010 @11:55AM
from the still-worth-it dept.

digitaldc writes "The scale of the delay and cost overrun blighting NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been laid bare by a panel called in to review the project. The group believes the final budget for Hubble's successor is likely to climb to at least $6.5bn, for a launch that is possible in September 2015. But even this assessment is optimistic (PDF), say the panel members. Estimates for JWST's total cost to build, launch and operate have steadily increased over the years from $3.5bn to $5bn. Along with the cost growth, the schedule has also eroded. The most recent projected launch of 2014 has looked under pressure for some time. Charles Bolden has ordered a reorganization of the project and has changed the management at its top. Whereas Hubble sees the Universe mostly in visible light, JWST will observe the cosmos at longer wavelengths, in the infrared. It will see deeper into space and further back in time, to the very first population of stars."

They built adaptive optics in this time, though there is a chance either the secondary mirror or the heat shield will fail to deploy (the heat shield is a significant risk as there is no vacuum chamber on earth large enough to fully test it).

Thing is, by the time you figure in the cost of a shuttle servicing, we could have sent up another hubble every 2 servicings or so. Especially once you started 'mass producing' them. At which point we'd have multiple hubbles, even if some are degraded, for about the same resource cost.

It'd be a different matter if we could service satellites from the ISS using some sort of pure space craft, just using the shuttle or Russian cargo pod to deliver parts and such.

the heat shield is a significant risk as there is no vacuum chamber on earth large enough to fully test it.

There was an analogous problem on Hubble (not wanting to do an end-to-end test due to the facilities required) which is one of the reasons the flawed mirror was not caught before deployment.

Sure, vacuum chambers are expensive to build. Is it worth significantly hampering a $6B project to avoid? There was a cartoon that someone taped to the wall where I worked at GSFC "back in the day" that showed a mouse in a lab coat poking a mouse trap. The caption was "One test is worth a thousand expert opinions."

I'm not sure what the cost of building a large enough chamber would be, but I know back when the budget was $3.5B it was deemed to be significant and had secondary affects on budget due to creating a longer project lifetime. Those positions may have changed given the significant cost increase and timeline slip, but it may be too late to change course now.

There was a cartoon that someone taped to the wall where I worked at GSFC "back in the day" that showed a mouse in a lab coat poking a mouse trap. The caption was "One test is worth a thousand expert opinions."

There was a cartoon that someone taped to the wall where I worked at GSFC "back in the day" that showed a mouse in a lab coat poking a mouse trap. The caption was "One test is worth a thousand expert opinions."

"Orbit we can't get to" now... (and TBH, if a desperate need would arise, we sort of have the ability already - launch Soyuz (limit the crew to 2, life support will be enough for 2+ weeks), launch heavily modified Progress (what some ISS modules [wikipedia.org] are, sort of), dock, off you go)

Or, they could build 5 for about the same cost as 1 (since most of the cost is R&D), and leave 4 of them here on Earth. Then they could fix one on the ground and send it up to replace the one that's out there.

Webb has a large shield that blocks the light from the Sun, Earth, and Moon, which otherwise would heat up the telescope, and interfere with the observations. To have this work, Webb must be in an orbit where all three of these objects are in about the same direction. The answer is to put Webb in an orbit around the L2 point.

what makes you think this wont support the war in Afghanistan ? we can finally find the tallest man in Pakistan - from orbit - at night

I know that's meant as a joke, but it doesn't work like that. The reason that we need the telescope in orbit is to avoid the distortion of looking through the atmosphere. Looking down is no different. You would have a very detailed blur.

I think sating our curiosity about the beginnings of the universe should take a back seat to our 13 trillion dollar deficit, our 9.6% unemployment rate, our sluggish exports market, our extended overseas military conflicts, our wide-open borders, and our faltering standing as the leader of the free world...but what do I know?

I fail to recognize how a complete replacement of one of the world's most powerful telescopes to gain a semi-marginal improvement in its abilities counts as an investment in science. I don't know, maybe it would be, but the time to recoup our costs would be far in the future to say the least. Let's wait until the economy turns around and for now focus on things less abstractly beneficial...

So the James Webb telescope will have about 5.8 times more mirror surface area than Hubble, and it will be able to observe on frequencies that Hubble can’t

That doesn't sound like a semi-marginal improvement. If the JWST had double the mirror surface and operated at the same wavelengths as the Hubble, then maybe you could call it a "semi-marginable" upgrade.

What makes this one so much more beneficial that it's going to help pull our economy out?

I have no argument against this -- I don't see how any telescope is going to pull our economy out of the state it's in.

But some research has to be state funded or it will never get done -- space exploration in one of those areas. If governments don't fund it, it won't get done because there's not much commercial payback in deep space knowledge.

You apparently think that no large research projects should be state funded because on a project that takes over a decade to plan and execute, it can't be left to the

Every dollar you give to a) engineers b) scientists c) computer technicians d) all the other support staff involved in programmes like this is a dollar that is pumped into your domestic economy. It's just as much a fiscal stimulus as the $600 billion quantitative easing programme that the Federal Reserve is about to embark on.

In fact it's better, in a few different ways:

1) It doesn't rely on a trickle down effect- which always risks part of the money you put in being leached away from its intended purpose (

Of all the $6 billion investments in science the government could be making with our tax dollars, what makes you think that this one is particularly effective at making the economy a better place?

And, in general, if you look at all the $6 billion investments in ANYTHING that at large society would be making if the government hadn't allocated these funds to this project, is the telescope really going to generate a better rate of return? The stock market (where people invest money in the most fungible way po

Of all the $6 billion investments in science the government could be making with our tax dollars, what makes you think that this one is particularly effective at making the economy a better place?

This is, of course, the standard argument that has always been used against most research, exploration, etc. If our ancestors had listened to it, we'd still be living in caves or on the plains of East Africa, living short, violent, disease-ridden lives.

How about close 90% of our overseas bases (leaving enough to have local sea and air ports in each theater), get the hell out of Iraq, kill a few more weapons platforms that the military doesn't even want, cut farmer subsidies for food we end up giving away, and then talk about cutting science funding?

Divide the 6.5 billion amongst all of the problems you list and you'll see how insignificant it is. That's like saying you should not buy that big screen TV because there are people in the world that are starving to death right now. Sure, it may be true that there are people starving to death, but not buying that big screen tv is not going to save them. It is a bigger issue.

I think sating our curiosity about the beginnings of the universe should take a back seat to our 13 trillion dollar deficit,

There is a difference between deficit and debt. In any event, while the cost (and cost overrun) on the JWST is a substantial amount of money, it is very small relative to the total debt or annual deficit. The complete NASA budget is less than $20 billion per year; even if the government chooses to destoy its entire space program it's a useless place to try to resolve the deficit. If you want to free up a couple of billion dollars in construction costs, cancel a Virginia-class attack submarine, or pare b

That's an unfortunate consequence of the lack of a "Perfect example for the sad state of humanity"-mod option.

May I in turn suggest ending your overseas military conflicts, use the cash to repair your ruined infrastructure, thereby raising employment rates and getting the local economies going? Then you can start to worry about your exports and fix your immigration system. Oh, and fuck that "leader of the free world" thing. I am part of the free world, and I feel no desire whatsoever to have any leader at

Though if those few satellites will fly in formation, as an interferometer... (yes, not what the parent meant / such formation telescopes, likely much more expensive than JWST, are coming...at some point)

Not really, but that's besides the point. For much less that $6.5 billion we could build a much larger telescope here, say 1/5th that. For that 1.2 billion you'd get more science, like from the European Extremely Large Telescope.

People love to point to Hubble pictures and say how great they are and how you couldn't get that on Earth. Hogwash. Hubble just gets all the publicity. NASA's good at that, and having IMAX films about it doesn't hurt. TMT has ten times

> No ground-based telescope is going to be able to observe at the infrared wavelengths that are needed to observe the ancient universe

So then we spend $6.5 billion (for now) to do that, or we could build far more practical designs that will return orders of magnitude more science for 1/5th the cost.

EVERY decision has to be studied in terms of price/performance. Space based telescopes can be extremely effective (the HALO series for instance) but in overall terms Hubble is not that great, and it's pretty c

I don't care if it costs 6.5 trillion. The amount of knowledge gained from peering that far back is invaluable.

I agree, but a project that is 4 years off, is already running over budget and is expected to get worse is worrying. These are signs of a project with intrinsic problems that will probably get in the way of the research trying to be done. It is worth considering starting over in order to avoid a multi billion dollar boondoggle. If the project is projected to cost more than twice as much as planned, odds are their plan wasn't very good, and will continue to cause problems.

Cost overruns can be a sign of severe mismanagement. They can also be a sign that the project faced great uncertainties from the get-go. Uncertainties like, how much will it cost to acquire technology X in 30 months? How many developer hours will it take to write the mirror controller software? What will the cost of putting this sucker in orbit be come 2015? You can only make educated guesses.

We're talking about a piece of genuine cutting edge technology here. Nobody has ever built anything like it.

Excellent rebuttal, I wish I could mod you up. Playing devil's advocate here, it is politically better to reform a project that is doing poorly than to stand up for it because, if it fails, it will look like it could have been scrapped early, and if it succeeds, early problems will distract from the accomplishment.

That supercomputer you're sitting in front of, molecular biology, genetic engineering, mass drug studies done using molecular modeling, they're all possible because of science. Science is an area, to be frank, still in its infancy. These big projects like JWST, by studying the structure of the universe, ultimately feed knowledge back into a refinement of our understanding of subjects like quantum mechanics.

Will JWST feed a hungry child? No. Will the science from JWST help improve our understanding of

I'm not against technology. Rather, quite for it. But we're spending billions attacking religion. We could be spending billions on things that will actually matter here at home. If we poured that kind of money into anti-gravity, we'd have extremely cheap travel and infinite energy and instantaneous communications. Fusion research. Asteroid detection and deflection.

All of these are "out there" in terms of today's tech, but are far more rewarding than trying to find god in the cosmos.

It is a 'nice to know' but really has zero impact on anything of any significance.

And how exactly do you know this? Number theory and lasers are classical examples of discoveries that didn't have direct applications, but which are now fundamental for modern society. Number theory is the basis of asymmetric cryptography, and lasers have countless applications.

We would be stuck in the stone age if we adopted such a dismissive approach to basic science.

This might be a bit of a flame-bating stretch but I'll take a shot at it. The JWST will be able to see as far back to a few moments (on a cosmic scale) just after the big bang. The amount of evidence (and pretty pictures) gathered regarding the origin of the universe stemming from a single, brilliant explosion will increase (and NASA will publicize it, they have a great PR program). Each bit of evidence ingested by young minds that are being raised in creationist households (or just generally uneducated hou

My father's a carpenter and has been for the better part of 40 years. One of the cardinal rules he was taught (and taught me) is that in contract work of his sort (and many other kinds), always estimate 130%. If you think a job is gonna cost $10,000, tell your customre $13,000. It gives you a good margin for error.

But these ridiculous low bids, well... we'll never see something sensible like that.

A carpenter can estimate the amount of time required to frame a house, or build a deck, with a high degree of accuracy. This is evidenced by the fact that he can put a rule on how much to over estimate. He can do this because of his 40 years experience. There are very few people experienced in building orbital infrared telescopes, hence the margin of error is much wider.

A carpenter can estimate the amount of time required to frame a house, or build a deck, with a high degree of accuracy. This is evidenced by the fact that he can put a rule on how much to over estimate. He can do this because of his 40 years experience. There are very few people experienced in building orbital infrared telescopes, hence the margin of error is much wider.

OTOH, the people who do bid on infrared telescopes generally are pretty good at cost estimates for that sort of thing. Just put in a larger margin for error, if it is appropriate.

Yes, his experience plays a lot into possible cost overruns, but I'd imagine a long career in science and engineering (as much of the team building this thing surely has) would equate to just as much experience towards figuring out roughly how long it would take to build this thing as well as how much.

Everything is the sum of its parts. Surely the telescope could have been broken down into small enough parts that they could have figured a better estimate for time and

This is why I would love to see the government sue people who grossly underbid contracts.

Governments typically ask companies to bid on things that may or may not be possible, then force them to put a price on it. Now you want them to be sued as well?

I can believe that companies keep using the same methodologies to make these bids, but don't understand why the government doesn't turn a wary eye to these predictions and multiply the given amount based on historical data. Then again, if nothing like this has ever been attempted it's hard to rely on historical data. No two projects will be o

In return, the contractor has to comply with the Truth in Negotiations Act (TINA [lectlaw.com], which will put contractor personnel in jail if there are any lies being told, whether through knowing underbidding or knowing overbidding.

TINA is a bitch. It requires the company to tell the government the truth. Not just the person writing the bid. So if the person writing the bid calculates X dollars for N units of wing-nut Z in a fighter jet, but a person

You always bid on the best case scenario, then specify that changes will require additional funding. If you do the work you said you'd do, at the cost you said, it's not really true that you've underbid it. The problem is that there are things that are unknowable going in. You could try to account for them by adding 50% or 100% to your bid, but that will put you at a disadvantage to the other bidders, and you'd just be pulling numbers out of your ass anyway.

The bidding process is to select the cheapest/best contractor for the job, not to get a realistic idea of the overall project cost. The bean-counters in Washington know that, but they don't want to put a realistic cost in a bill because they know it won't get funded. Realistically, for this kind of project they should always add 100% or 150% to the bid price to allow for unforeseen problems. Even for a typical infrastructure project they should probably add at least 50% to accommodate change-orders. Then if it's to expensive, they should cancel the project from the start, rather than waiting till they've sunk most of the cost to decide to cancel it.

I would love to see the government sue people who grossly underbid contracts.

It might also be interesting if the defense's strategy was to demonstrate to the court that the government requires underbidding. This is easily demonstrated by showing that the contracts are usually awarded to the lowest bidder, regardless of whether the bid is realistic.

It would be fairly reasonable for a judge to agree that underbidding is required by current law, and thus can't be considered unlawful.;-)

You don't sue people who underbid contracts. You make them do the work for the price they quoted. The hard part is making sure that you bought everything you think you paid for, that's why contracts and specifications are so long.
Somewhat off-topic, but my boss yesterday was telling me about the time the local public housing authority tried to get him to do something that was against his better engineering judgement, and he refused. They terminated his contract (they write the ability to do that witho

As anyone who has done any project of significant size, there are always change orders that end up ballooning the price of the contract. It's not that the vendor keeps stalling and adding more billable hours -- open ended contracts like that are relatively rare.

No complex project has a 100% complete spec, there are always things found along the way. "You know those halogen lights we spec'ed 5 years ago? Now we want LED lighting, how much will that cost us?" "I know we said wanted this software to do X last

The problem with this type of contract is that if the project starts to go too far under budget, the project manager will add enough resources to keep it on track. Likewise, if it starts to go over budget, then fewer resources can be devoted "Do we really need 6 months of QA with 24 people? I'll just pressure one of my engineers to write up a justification for why it can be done in 4 months with 16 people without sacrificing quality".

Every big scientific project looks bad when projected onto the one-dimensional axis of cost. They're big, expensive, and the accounting for them is a discipline onto itself. None of this has anything to do with science. The scientific goals of the JWST are laudable and important, and as a society, we need to figure out how to get them done. The US has a substantial problem in this area. The nature of the US congress is that it cannot force any future congress to do anything, include paying for a project they proposed last year. So, every single year, every big scientific endeavor has to fight for its life. Every big project will run into problems and roadbumps along the way, but these are smart people and they can figure it out. The difficulty of the project makes it more important that it be completed, rather than less.

But what inevitably happens is that Big Science Project reaches some cost overrun or technical snag, or national economics takes a temporary downturn. Gloom-and-doom articles are written. Review panels are formed. Said project gets cancelled next year, after an investment of billions of dollars. You might call it Ares [wikipedia.org] or the Superconducting Supercollider [wikipedia.org]. Meanwhile, countries with more stable funding structures are able to achieve the same goals. You might call them China, India, the ESA or CERN.

I'm a theoretical physicist. Early in my career, the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled. It was three times the energy of the LHC. Had the US had the balls to carry forward with that project, we would have discovered the Higgs boson and answered many important questions, as much as 10 years ago already. Yeah there were some political and funding problems but these could have been fixed. I spent several years at CERN. They have a funding structure in which member states pay into a common pot as a fraction of their GDP as an international treaty. When there are cost overruns or problems (recall the magnet explosion last year that shut down the LHC for a year?) the fixed budget means it just takes longer. The project does not risk cancellation. We still get the important science results. As a consequence, they can go for more speculative, long-term research. They are able to drive advancement. The next CERN collider, CLIC [wikipedia.org] has been in the planning and develoment stages for years. It uses new experimental (and still not fully proved) kind of particle acceleration.

The US will lose in the global science race unless it can establish a more stable funding structure for big science projects, and use them to drive scientific advancement. These things are important. Through the JWST and LHC we gain invaluable knowledge about the structure of our universe. Don't let short-sighted penny pinching bureaucrats or alarmist journalism deprive us of scientific progress.

From guys I know who work on these things, when you invent something completely new and cutting edge for launch into space, referring to the costs as a "budget" is kind of silly. It's an "estimate" at best. yeah, maybe the estimates need to be better, but the media like to portray it like like Starbucks putting up their next coffee shop in a mall, with tidy little plans and budgets you can hire guys hanging out over at Home Depot to do the base work. Then again this is the same pack of moronic miseryshits w

The industry has also shot itself in the foot on this. There is so much unpaid and unrecorded overtime thanks to the whole "exempt" employee concept. Even if you make a truly honest attempt to make a bid based on previous designs, you could be 100% or more out of kilter.

The lowest credible bid gets the money. No reason not to shoot yourself in the foot multiple times, if you get hundreds of millions in profits each time you do so.

BTW, I highly recommend both the LHC [twitter.com] and Angry Birds. The latter is highly playable, apparently the physics are correct (at least, the gravity is [wired.com], not so sure about feathered-friend vs. oaken plank [rovio.com]) and all puzzles are solvable at the maximum bonus if you have the touch.

Ares V was probably not the best idea though - yes, its goals and performance commemorable; but they would also mean quite rare launches, limiting bang-for-buck, to say the least. Probably better to focus on something medium-sized, pushing it ever closer towards mass production and usage - and if more throw weight is required, plan for modularity (something like from Angara 1.1 to Angara 7)... and if that's not enough, two or three launches + orbital docking. Even on Earth we built ocean-going ships in segm

What I see here is abject laziness and a remarkable disrespect for where the money comes from. First, let's start with the implication that Big Science is necessary to remain globally competitive. Big science takes dollars from small science (that is, it has large opportunity costs compared to its benefits even when you restrict your attention to scientific output). It's not entirely a zero sum game, but close enough on the time scale of science projects. Small science is where the actual value of science i

Your plan is ridiculous. How are we supposed to redirect pork to the most important districts every 2 years if there's some kind of "stable funding structure"? It's like you don't even understand the point of the US government.

This will go on for several more years, wasting at least one billion $ (possibly considerably more). Periodically, a new slate of promises will emerge (with some cool looking computer animation at the press conference), accompanied by setbacks that always leave the launch just a few years out of reach. At one point NASA will simply stop talking about the project, and the press (with the attention span of a 3-year-old-child) will never follow up on it or ask why it failed or why so much was wasted on it (hav

The Moon has a relatively stable orbit, so far. Telescopes could then be placed on adjustable platforms. Maintenance could handled on sight as needed, by calmer minds. Long term issues could be more easily evaluated, by more senior staff.

This other option necessitating much higher delta-v (arrival at the Moon, structure which needs to survive touchdown and operation in gravity) plus permanently blocked from large portion of the sky by the Moon itself (location at one of the peaks of eternal light near the poles would be likely, for power). L2 isn't that unstable - and if something goes wrong it's easier to get there than to the surface of the Moon. Long term doesn't matter too much, eventually you have a space weathered junk anyway.

Much of the public believes NASA's portion of the budget is much larger than its one percent. Plus cutting NASA doesnt affect core federal functions they believe.
Most federal science will be under budgetary attack the next few years.

It strikes me that JWST has already been descoped so the project is not so much over budget as under scienced. In the long run, we are going to need a bigger telescope with better mid-infrared capability, possibly an interferometer. So, let's consider this a prototype and any budget issues are just part of the learning curve.

For a place that bills itself as "news for nerds" there certainly is a very large group here who seem to not be interested in any type of scientific research, are seem more interesting in whining about paying taxes.

A lot of us didn't want to invade Iraq, but our tax dollars were used any way. Don't want us to pay for a space telescope? Tough shit!

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.

In the last 24 hours we have seen facilities now being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man's history. We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. We have seen the site where five F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined, will be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a 48 story structure, as wide as a city block, and as long as two lengths of this field.

Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the earth. Some 40 of them were made in the United States of America and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.

The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the 40-yard lines.

Transit satellites are helping our ships at sea to steer a safer course. Tiros satellites have given us unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and will do the same for forest fires and icebergs.

We have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them. And they may be less public.